Definitely! While there are many reasons related to fairness and the proper expenditures of public money that drives the public RFP/response system in governments, there are as many reasons in the private sector to use the same tactics. The IT practices of a corporation should be just as accountable.

One of the key reasons for governments to build the whole request for proposal process was to reduce the amount of favoritism, corruption, and misappropriation of public funds. Are corporate IT departments not prone to the same problems? And should they not be just as accountable? Especially in a publicly traded corporation that has to answer to share holders.

There are also other good reasons to use RFIs, RFQs, and RFPs in the private sector. Corporate IT is plagued with implementing tools and building systems without doing the proper diligence ahead of time. Having a team actually think about the requirements and needs of the organization, documenting them, and having the vendors identify their ability to meet those requirements is invaluable.

IT departments may discover that there are competitors that can meet their needs besides the one that advertises on the back page of which ever industry rag they read regularly. They may find that there are lower cost solutions that will meet their needs, or a product that better suits their requirements without buying a bunch of feature that they will never use.

My experience in the industry has proven to me that IT departments in the private sector are just as prone to tunnel vision, influence, poor preparation, and ineffective decision making as the public sector. Perhaps they should start looking at some of the methods government used to fix it. Why shouldn't they be just as accountable?

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Craig has over 25 years of Technology Consulting experience including 10 years in Project Leadership roles. He has extensive background working with large scale, high-profile systems integration and development projects that span a customer’s organization, and experience designing robust solutions that bring together multiple platforms from Intel to Unix to Mainframe technologies with the Internet.